Raine actually took a glance over the grass in front of them. Part of her sort of saw Joe’s point but it was still hard to let that filter through the blind fog of panic that said she was too stupid for any of this, and probably couldn’t identify a grass if it walked up and introduced itself, and that she was doomed to failure. Having already had one outburst though, which was one more than she’d ever had in her lifetime at someone who wasn’t Kyte, she was back to holding all of this in her head, and merely nodded somewhat stiffly and mechanically to Joe’s suggestion.

“No… You didn’t,” Raine assured him when he apologised if he’d sounded… something. She didn’t actually know the word he used, but she was pretty sure she could assume that it was something bad, and that it wasn’t warranted for Joe to think it about himself just because she was stressy from doing badly on a test. It was tricky to follow what Joe was saying next, because she was still a bit wrapped up in everything that was going wrong, and because the idea that someone could actually not study for the exams just made her brain short circuit. She knew that other people were smart, a lot smarter than she was, but she’d just sort of assumed everyone still had study.

“It’s me,” she added, choosing to continue with the line of Why This Wasn’t Joe’s Fault because she really couldn’t think of anything to say about his brother being a genius but also a complete ass. Her eyes filled with tears. “I just… I just can’t do any of it. I’m useless. I’m useless, and I’m going to fail everything.” The tears started steadily falling. She wiped futily with her sleeve but there was no hiding the fact that she was crying.

Joe was not - altogether - unfamiliar with being yelled at. When Stephen and Paul had been teenagers, they had bellowed at him to leave them alone often enough, and John's immaturity had always been... more

Well, Raine was clearly not okay, but knowing this proved less helpful than Joe could have hoped. He still, for instance, had no idea what to do to fix the problem. The last time he’d been party to a ... more

“No. I mean, sort of…. But it’s not just the test,” Raine tried to explain. It wasn’t the test, or Joe or Professor Xavier or anyone or anything else’s fault that she was thick. “It’s me… I can’t do... more

That it wasn’t just the test sparking a near-breakdown was, Joe thought, a simple enough concept to grasp – it rarely was, he thought, ever really just one thing, even if one thing was the thing that ... more

Raine watched Joe’s little note wing its way to the Professor. It was not met immediately with rage at their sheer presumption and the barring of the greenhouse door. Again, this was difficult to... more

Professor Xavier was a concern, but not a large one, really. The Head of Teppenpaw was mild-mannered - the sort of person Joe tended to assume would not strongly oppose anything remotely reasonable... more